So, Grokipedia. The posting grokipedia.com/page/Bramshi... is an interesting study. Clearly the system has ingested a large number of HTML pages and online PDFs. If you look at the references, however, you might wonder if a gravel business's website had much to do with early modern topography.

Right. A small pile of retreads could masquerade as the Michelin man. A shedload of old tyres is definitely a junkyard vibe.

Indeed, the Catcher-in-the-Rye objection to "phoniness" is a surprise. Not because there is a shortage in adolescents, but because putting a teenaged mind in the Oval Office is not what adults should condone. More so when senility is another issue.

In 2016 7% of biographies on #Wikipedia about classicists were about women. Now @richardnevell.bsky.social's wonderful analysis shows that 10 years later, that number is now almost 20%. That's a huge achievement! #WCCWiki

The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography login is not impressing. Very keen on logging you out, and intermittently just not allowing library card logins.

Under the law, ICE is required to provide necessary medical care for the people it detains, often using third-party providers to do so. ICE, however, has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025.

‘More than 150 children — most of whom were unvaccinated — were hospitalized. Two unvaccinated children and one adult died from measles complications, the first such deaths in the country in a decade’ #trump #republican #rfk #children www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/w...

If for telling porkies, the judges would have a bigger field, but perhaps an easier task.

👉 bit.ly/Wikipédiaa25ans Crédit image : Michael Barbereau WMFr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons #Wikipedia #WikimediaFrance #Wikipedia25 #WebLibre

I suppose Trump's Greenland lunge may turn out to be his Bay of MCPs.

If only the region got on better, a precious piece of East Asia's shared heritage could gain more purchase abroad

Hmmm. Also facing hundreds of millions of users who find it helpful, a role as AI substrate, and "with enemies like that who needs friends". BTW, the ideals of Wikipedia include knowing what to believe online, and verifying what you write about.

Happy 25th birthday Wikipedia, you beautiful thing. store.wikimedia.org/products/car...

Scorecard after 12 months of Donald: - wants to put the squeeze on all other nations but Argentina. - wants to be appeased, and thinks Putin has a right to be? - looks to be helping Chinese economic hegemony, as George W. Bush did. - favours decapitation as Israel does, but more ignorantly. Duck.

Right. Traditionally Wikipedia's volunteers celebrate by looking around for a while, saying "see how far we've come", and then realising how much there is still to do. And getting back to work.

Musk's universe is a testament to "feature not a bug" as a panacea.

Sadly, ORCID is not really oriented towards author disambiguation, of concern to Wikidata. Profiles without public information are a negative, and the system is not de-duplicated. Sadly, too, OpenAlex is poor on the issue, apparently relying on dud AI.

Aren't the fundamental issues with scholcomms always tied in with publish-or-perish? If careers based on publication were founded on ruling-in of papers, rather than ruling out, matters would look rather different. (Which is what happens informally in the top flight.)

So, is Mariupol up to Reform standards?

Well, I have done a first pass for updating P486 on Wikidata, from the unofficial meshb-prev.nlm.nih.gov. I'll know more when the MeSH SPARQL is updated. Currently no 2026 results.

Whatever you might think of Maduro, the seizure and kidnapping of a head of state takes us to a very dark place. Vast, arbitrary, extra-legal power, which could be exercised almost anywhere, regardless of the character of the target government.

I don't know why "oddly". Farage campaigned for Brexit on an anti-immigration platform, knowing (as he said at the time) that Johnson's case was flawed. Starmer knows that (a) Brits don't like people who argue the toss, and (b) Tory incompetence exacerbated the immigration issue. Timing is key.

Update on the Trump-Monroe doctrine reads "Some Like It Illegal".

Tesla loses EV crown to China’s BYD ft.trib.al/63A0hnl

"Trek" towards "final frontier", obvs. Recall the demise of the TV western at around the time Star Trek was launched. Connotations yes, "starship science" not.

Hmmm. At this time of year, I update MeSH on Wikidata. In 2026, things appear be behindhand: www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbul...

2025 has provided a terrifying sense of how dramatically socio-technical systems can career out of human control. In 2026 let’s all find ways to re-assert the common good together. Happy New Year Bluesky!

By the way, the idea of "great mathematicians" post-Gauss seems troublesome.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... Indeed a major mathematician of the 20th century.

"Thou art lost and gone forever. Dreadful sorry, Clementine." What next - cockney rhyming slang for "oranges and lemons"?

I think it should be pointed out that the "agentic" Web was actively considered 30 years ago. So the concept is a retread, and we have to wonder exactly what has changed. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/micha...

A blazon troublesome for the Drawshield software, but I like the op art vibe of this escutcheon of the Lewis baronets of Harpton Court.

Is there a gyre app?

Hallelujah www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c4...

Very welcome news today that the UK will join the Erasmus+ programme in 2027. This will enable greater opportunities for study abroad and contributions in UK universities, and is something we called for in our most recent Manifesto.

It's a new day, and that means a new batch of Verge articles are completely free to read (until tomorow). First up, from @joshdzieza.bsky.social: The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack. www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Yup, always wanting to party like its 1959.

Apparently so. One can edit the browser line to read books?id and concatenate with the GB key and then with &pg= followed by page code. That gives a URL that still works. Why-oh-why.

I prefer the classic view of Google Books. Is it true that this has been turned off (I'm in the UK)?

Political pantos I'd like to see: 1. The Princess and the Pea - entitled royal in faux national emergency. 2. Sorcerer's Apprentices - young fools ignore ban on dark magic, get more than bargained for. 3. The Golden Eggs - peace after a witch war spurned in the name of freedom from repression.

Well, I'll be there.

Pasquale Paoli: the English Wikipedia is quite long, if lacking references for parts. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasqual...

There is plenty to say about Wikidata, WikiCite, Scholia, SPARQL, and Blazegraph. About software development and big data issues. I don't propose to discuss all that here, though.

Why does it help to blur the distinction in this way between the work and the image of the work? What is said about THJ v. Sheridan, 2023 in the UK at the end of the Wikipedia article on Bridgeman v. Corel is more helpful. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgem....

#Metaverse For many years now, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have been the only one with any great belief in the future of his so called ‘metaverse’, but reality may now be hitting home.

Some v interesting stuff in this paper on where Grokipedia draws its information from, but this bit from the introduction has really caught my eye - the cite is to Gettier on justified true belief. A lot to think about there!

I notice on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observa... nine uses of the word "greetings". The redirect "holiday greetings" goes to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christm... (section anchor). I would say a "Christmas greetings" article is warranted.

To a man toxic to the core, everything looks like a pretext.

The point I see is that administrative measures can be changed by administrative means.

"Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Yes, Google, so you say. You do _index_ that information, and now process it with machine learning. I think you'll find Wikimedia organises it, in detail, for people and machines.